THE HISTORY OF MINECRAFT: How a Swedish Indie Game Came to Dominate the World

Editor's Note: Minecraft enthusiast Will M. ('15) synthesizes the history of the popular game in this self-assigned essay.

As you may have seen in a recent issue of the Prism, I was the creator of a popular Packer Minecraft server known as “Second Semester Server.” Despite its name, I initially opened the server during the end of December 2014, and, in a matter of weeks, it quickly grew to the point where it had an active daily playerbase of around thirty users. The size of the server’s population as well as the daily drama in the student center resulting from Minecraft politics both illustrate the appeal of massively multiplayer Minecraft among high school students, even though Minecraft is primarily known as a game played by a younger age bracket. My goal in this article is to talk a little bit about multiplayer Minecraft from a technical and historical perspective and, insodoing, provide some insight into how a game with no real objective can captivate an entire community for so long.

The cult of Minecraft started in 2009 when Swedish game developer Markus “Notch” Persson started working on an experimental sandbox game where players could build and navigate a world of textured cubes. Contrary to popular belief, the concept of a cubic sandbox world was somewhat established in the gaming world before the creation of Minecraft, and Notch himself credits other indie games like Zachary Barth’s Infiniminer for this idea. What was revolutionary about Minecraft, however, was that Notch had a vision to simplify the gameplay to its elegant sandbox core. Although Infiniminer was set in an entirely editable environment, it still had clearly defined objectives and victory conditions for the player to achieve. With Minecraft, Notch attempted to get rid of all artificial rules imposed on the player, leaving them in their own virtual universe. Therefore, there is no simple answer to the question “what is the point of Minecraft?”, and in many ways, its answer is meant to be as existentially absurd and open-ended as the meaning of life.

From its earliest days, Minecraft experienced incredible success for an experimental indie game designed by an unknown Swedish game developer. Yet, more would have to happen for it to become the international sensation it is today. The true Holy Grail would be a game like Minecraft that was not just one player in their own world, but an entire of community of players existing and creating together. Notch himself recognized this: multiplayer was incorporated into Minecraft relatively early, but due to the inefficient, buggy, and disorganized nature of Minecraft’s source code, there were many technical obstacles that prevented true multiplayer survival Minecraft (MCSMP) from being achieved for some time. Mojang, Notch’s gaming studio, gradually fixed many of the bugs and exploits that ruined multiplayer Minecraft. In 2009, it released version 0.30_02 which addressed problems with wall collisions, and in 2010, another major patch was released that transferred player inventories from the game client to the server.

Despite this progress, the biggest addition to multiplayer Minecraft was to come not from Mojang, but from the community that played the game. Although the Java source code for the Minecraft client and server was never made open-source by Mojang, the fact that Minecraft was distributed as a JAR file made it possible for fans with programming knowledge to decompile and deobfuscate the binary files in order to recreate the source. After this was accomplished, Minecraft enthusiasts all around the world were able to create their own customized versions of the game, or “mods”, and distribute them online. Initially, most of these mods focused on adding new features to singleplayer Minecraft, but with time, developers realized that modding had the potential to transform the multiplayer Minecraft experience. One developer in particular, going by the username hey0, rebuilt the Minecraft server from the ground up in a project that he called hMod. Not only was hMod a more optimized version of the original Minecraft server source, but it also added many useful multiplayer features like build protection and advanced chat commands. Perhaps most importantly, the modded server was designed to work seamlessly with unmodded clients so that users did not have to go through the difficult process of installing mods in order to play a modded game online.

It is no coincidence that the creation of hMod roughly coincides with the arrival of Minecraft at Packer in late 2010. The improved server made MCSMP gameplay viable for the first time, and a game which had previously seemed lonely or boring at times suddenly took on a whole new social dimension. Dedicated Minecraft servers sprung up across the Internet, and each one began to develop its own unique community of consistent players. Soon, however, hey0 found it increasingly difficult to keep hMod up to date as Mojang continued to rapidly update Minecraft, and as a result, the project was discontinued. The disappearance of hMod created a vacuum among the online Minecraft community that could only be filled by the creation of a new standard multiplayer mod.The mod that eventually rose to replace hMod was Bukkit, an open-source project created by a team of leading Minecraft modders that was not simply a re-coding of hMod, but truly ground-breaking in its own right. Whereas hMod had been one single mod of the Minecraft source that implemented a handful of useful features, Bukkit was a mod of the Minecraft source that was meant to be a wrapper for individual “plugins”, or small, independent additions to the game that could be developed by anyone with knowledge of Java. Multiple plugins, as opposed to mods, could be easily installed at one time, and all that a server admin had to do to install a Minecraft plugin was drag that plugin’s binary file into a specific folder. As independent developers all over the world continued to add to an ever-growing volume of free plugins available online, multiplayer Minecraft was forever changed because servers were able to use increasingly more unique combinations of plugins, and, thus, provide an incredible customized experience for their users. Minecraft multiplayer was no longer one uniform game, but a set of distinct virtual realities bound together by the core game mechanics envisioned by Mojang.Bukkit became so integral to the online Minecraft community that Mojang ended up hiring many of the Bukkit developers to work on the the development of Minecraft itself. Multiplayer Minecraft grew immensely in popularity, and along with the new population of players came a new potential for conflict online. Player versus player combat (PVP) had always been a feature of Minecraft, but a series of updates as well as some ingeniously crafted Bukkit plugins were to completely revolutionize PVP mechanics. First, Mojang made PVP more realistic and skill-based by improving the healing system, fixing arrow and sword mechanics, and then adding weapon upgrades and potion crafting. Recognizing the potential for multiplayer combat on PVP servers, a Swedish developer named Olof Larsson then created a plugin called Factions that allowed groups of players to form a nation together, build a castle, and siege enemy strongholds. Factions prevented raiding players from breaking blocks in enemy land in order to gain entrance, instead forcing them to rely on the physics of the explosive block TNT in order to build cannons and ballistic missiles. Raiding became an act of not just fighting, but also resource management and creative problem solving. As virtual war after virtual war broke out on the battlefields of cyber-reality, the theory behind faction raiding and defense grew increasingly more complex and nuanced to the point where a formalized discussion of it could fill an article much larger than this one. Combined with the complicated sociopolitical dynamics of a Minecraft server community, faction raiding added a whole new thrill of destruction and competition to a game which had previously been focused more exclusively on building.

In September of 2013, Microsoft bought all rights to Minecraft from Mojang for $2.5 billion dollars. Along with the revisions to Minecraft’s End-User License Agreement (EULA) associated with this acquisition came several significant changes to the way Minecraft was played, including the theoretical abolition of “pay-to-play” servers where admins gave players perks in exchange for money. On a more negative note, although the newly formalized policy on modding did not differ much from the existing de facto policy, it brought about the eventual dissolution of Bukkit. Although the underlying causes of this event are still mysterious, it seems that it arose out of a dispute between a group of the original Bukkit developers that was going on at the time when Minecraft’s EULA had just been reworked. Consequently, one former Bukkit developer who had in turn been hired by Mojang claimed that the inclusion of his original work within the Bukkit source code violated Mojang’s new policy. As a result, Bukkit faced an intellectual property rights lawsuit under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and the most recently created version of the Bukkit server quickly fell out of date as all active development ground to a halt. The key ingredient to the success of multiplayer Minecraft had disappeared, and to many, the future of the game under the corporate influence of Microsoft looked grim.

As of the time of writing, Bukkit still has not made a reappearance into the world of multiplayer Minecraft, although some loopholes have been found to make the wealth of Bukkit plugin content available on the newest versions of Minecraft. Spigot, an independent server mod created before the dissolution of Bukkit, has been used by many Minecraft servers because it was initially designed to be compatible with all Bukkit plugins. As a legal technicality, however, the runnable Spigot JAR file cannot be distributed online, and therefore server admins must go through the tedious process of building it themselves by decompiling the official Minecraft server source file and inserting the changes made by Spigot. Therefore, as a result of the legal issues with Bukkit, running a Bukkit server has become much more difficult than it previously was, and multiplayer Minecraft has lost the ease of accessibility that once accelerated its spread. In addition, the precedent set by an intellectual property lawsuit against one of the most important Minecraft mods of all time undermined the belief in the freedom of information that had previously characterized Mojang’s attitude toward its community. In many ways, multiplayer Minecraft’s historical success has been due more to the work of independent modders than to Mojang’s developers themselves, and it is my opinion that Microsoft, a corporation historically inclined to closed-source development, must learn to accept this if Minecraft is to continue to prosper.